When I first saw The Holy Body Tattoo's Monumental, back in 2005, I was just beginning to immerse myself in the Vancouver dance scene. It blew my mind. Here was a piece that combined a pounding rock score, projections showcasing the inimitable social observations of text-based artist Jenny Holzer, and 75 minutes of relentless, physically punishing choreography--much of it in unison or complicated canon--performed by nine dancers on top of raised plinths. A post-9/11 meditation on the fear, anxiety, alienation and atomizing sameness of life in the global city, the piece had an electric response on the audience. Exhausted and ennervated, but also jangly with an excess of sensory energy, it was impossible not to feel more alive exiting the theatre. And not to want more of this kind of dance performance in the city.
Unfortunately, Monumental would be the last work produced by The Holy Body Tattoo's co-founders, Dana Gingras and Noam Gagnon. After twelve years creating some of the most original, genre-defying, and athletic works in the city, they went there separate ways. Dana moved to Montreal to found Animals of Distinction and Noam stayed put to run Vision Impure. But, to paraphrase Buddy Holly, the love has not faded away. After a ten-year hiatus, the two choreographers are back together, reforming The Holy Body Tattoo for a remount of Monumental, this time with live music by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The first performance of a planned world tour was last night at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, presented as part of the PuSh Festival. The experience of seeing the work once again in a space just next door from where I originally saw it (the Playhouse) was uncanny. It wasn't so much that I kept anticipating or misremembering what was coming next, or that I spent the evening mapping this production's dancers onto the bodies of the original cast (all but Shay Kuebler appear to be from Montreal this time around). Rather, I think it was that my sedimented memories of 2005 were awakened just enough by the spatial proximity of this 2016 performance to make it seem, for a brief palimpsestic moment, as if no time had passed at all.
While my schedule this morning doesn't permit me to go into depth about the show (I'll leave that cumulative assignment to my students, who have been instructed to post capsule reviews of the piece here), I do want to comment on three things. First, if you'll forgive the bad pun (though not as bad as Norman's in introducing the show last night!), the live music definitely elevates Monumental to new heights. The bass beat of the drums alone is enough to quicken one's pulse, so much so that I'm sure in some of the more propulsive sections my heart was keeping as strict a count as the dancers on their plinths. Second, I had forgotten how much tenderness Dana and Noam had woven into the piece alongside all of the ruthless and at times downright cruel physicality. In Monumental the dancers are merciless in their abuse of their own and each others' bodies, first driving their legs into and then throwing their entire bodies at the plinths, obsessively combing or pulling at their hair like it's filled with lice, and routinely chasing and swatting and encircling and goading each other like so many schoolyard bullies. At the same time, as in the ending to the piece, there are quiet moments of compassion and connection when one dancer will reach out to another, or offer a limb as ballast, or lift a broken body up off the floor. And many of the poses and gestures that the dancers cycle through on their plinths can be read as much as acts of supplication as of angry accusation. Finally, it bears mentioning that I don't think I've ever seen the Queen E so full and animated with buzzy energy pre- and post-show; granted, several audience members clearly thought they were at a rock concert rather than a dance show (maybe mistaking The Holy Body Tattoo as Godspeed You's opening band). There were a lot of people who kept getting up and down from their seats and much general wandering around during the performance; it was mildly distracting, but nothing this total--and totally captivating--work of art couldn't exorcise with one crashing guitar chord, or nine crashing bodies.
P.
Showing posts with label The Holy Body Tattoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Holy Body Tattoo. Show all posts
Friday, January 29, 2016
Friday, July 4, 2014
Ottawa Dance Directive at DOTE
The Dancing on the Edge Festival began its next quarter century last night at the Firehall with an opening performance by Ottawa Dance Directive (ODD). Founded in 2010 as an incubator and presenter of new work, ODD created a splash at the 2012 Canada Dance Festival with the premiere of resident choreographer Yvonne Coutts' Fracture and guest choreographer Tedd Robinson's Trembleherd Bells. Both of the works, slightly re-conceived, were on the program last night, alongside a new work for the company by Vancouver-based choreographer Noam Gagnon called sho me wut u gut.
One wonders if the development of the last piece influenced some of the choices made in the remounting of the first two. For, while all three works are very different with respect to their movement vocabularies, there is a tonal/thematic/narrative through-line to the evening that unfortunately casts something of a homogenous sameness over the proceedings: lots of hair being whipped around; lots of bodies falling to the floor for no apparent reason; lots of bare flesh. To be sure, we are alerted to such behind-the-scenes connections at the top of the first piece. Company member Riley Sims, munching from a bag of candies, walks on stage with Jasmine Inns and Marilou Lépine--both wearing full-length evening gowns--and announces that while we may have been expecting a duet (as Coutts had originally choreographed Fracture), the company recently received some more money; hence his presence. Sims seems mostly to have been added as a talking head, commenting not just on what we are watching, but (as per my earlier speculations) hinting at what we can expect to see later on in the program (via a reference to an earlier working title for Gagnon's piece). Indeed, Sims labours for most of the piece to insert himself within the closed intimacy of the female dancers' world: at first humourously by miscounting the beats of their unison movement (and getting his face slapped); then more aggressively by picking up and moving Inns' gyrating body about the dance floor; and at last sensuously by stripping to his underwear and attempting to mimic the women's swaying hips, languorous arm waves, and joyous jumps. However, the women never fully include Sims in their world, which reads like a compendium of the mysteries of sisterly bonds: from the virtuosic synchronicity of hand-clapping games, to the out-of-nowhere perplexity of mean girl shoves, and the restorative grace of womanly partnering. Given this, and given that the real dance focus of the piece is on the women, my question is why we need Sims at all. If one is trying to concentrate on the movement, he is mostly a distraction.
In Robinson's Trembleherd Bells, Sims, Inns, and Lépine are joined by Charles Cardin-Bourbeau and Simon Renaud. As the curtains part, the dancers, clad in white, are all clumped together upstage; downstage a collection of cowbells has been arranged. Renaud, shirtless and holding a book, appears to be the leader of the group, whom we are wont to read as cult-like followers in search of spiritual and physical direction. Inevitably, that search propels the dancers towards the cowbells; however, once the first bell is rung, the limited cohesion that seems to have existed in the dancers' collective aimlessness is sundered, as bodies disperse about the stage, resist each other's embrace and, eventually, descend into solitary paroxysms. In Sims' case, this means a full-body twitching downstage centre that can only be stilled by a final ringing of one of those bells. Needless to say, I was grateful for the blackout that followed.
The exploration of sexual and social bonds that I have, albeit retrospectively, been reading into the first two pieces owes much to Gagnon's concluding sho me wut u gut, which wears (quite literally) its in-your-face attitude on its dancers' well-cut sleeves. Mind you, the men's shirts and the women's blouses--along with their pants, skirts, dress shoes, stiletto heels, and of course underwear--will all eventually come off by the end of the piece, with the five company members engaging in various same-sex and opposite-sex couplings, bodily gropings, animalistic howlings and, just because, dry humpings of the floor. Not that we don't also see moving moments of tenderness, not to mention some sublime group dancing. Indeed, at times during the piece I was reminded of what so captivated me about Gagnon and partner Dana Gingras' trademark choreography for The Holy Body Tattoo: high energy and highly physical unison movement performed by talented young dancers to pulsating music. It's hard to concentrate on that or any kind of movement technique when dancers' clothes start coming off (as Arlene Croce has famously written, in what might be taken as a ballerina's credo for never removing her tights, on stage it is the arabesque that is real, not the leg executing it). Which is not to say that nakedness in dance doesn't have its place (Alistair McCaulay has written perceptively on the topic--referencing Croce--in the New York Times), or that it cannot also be referenced in a smart and self-reflexive way (as in Frédérick Gravel's Usually Beauty Fails, which played the PuSh Festival this past year, and which I wrote about here). But the nudity as an end point in Gagnon's piece was so belaboured and so obvious that for me it actually got in the way of seeing the movement. Like Sims in Coutts' Fracture, it was a distraction.
P.
One wonders if the development of the last piece influenced some of the choices made in the remounting of the first two. For, while all three works are very different with respect to their movement vocabularies, there is a tonal/thematic/narrative through-line to the evening that unfortunately casts something of a homogenous sameness over the proceedings: lots of hair being whipped around; lots of bodies falling to the floor for no apparent reason; lots of bare flesh. To be sure, we are alerted to such behind-the-scenes connections at the top of the first piece. Company member Riley Sims, munching from a bag of candies, walks on stage with Jasmine Inns and Marilou Lépine--both wearing full-length evening gowns--and announces that while we may have been expecting a duet (as Coutts had originally choreographed Fracture), the company recently received some more money; hence his presence. Sims seems mostly to have been added as a talking head, commenting not just on what we are watching, but (as per my earlier speculations) hinting at what we can expect to see later on in the program (via a reference to an earlier working title for Gagnon's piece). Indeed, Sims labours for most of the piece to insert himself within the closed intimacy of the female dancers' world: at first humourously by miscounting the beats of their unison movement (and getting his face slapped); then more aggressively by picking up and moving Inns' gyrating body about the dance floor; and at last sensuously by stripping to his underwear and attempting to mimic the women's swaying hips, languorous arm waves, and joyous jumps. However, the women never fully include Sims in their world, which reads like a compendium of the mysteries of sisterly bonds: from the virtuosic synchronicity of hand-clapping games, to the out-of-nowhere perplexity of mean girl shoves, and the restorative grace of womanly partnering. Given this, and given that the real dance focus of the piece is on the women, my question is why we need Sims at all. If one is trying to concentrate on the movement, he is mostly a distraction.
In Robinson's Trembleherd Bells, Sims, Inns, and Lépine are joined by Charles Cardin-Bourbeau and Simon Renaud. As the curtains part, the dancers, clad in white, are all clumped together upstage; downstage a collection of cowbells has been arranged. Renaud, shirtless and holding a book, appears to be the leader of the group, whom we are wont to read as cult-like followers in search of spiritual and physical direction. Inevitably, that search propels the dancers towards the cowbells; however, once the first bell is rung, the limited cohesion that seems to have existed in the dancers' collective aimlessness is sundered, as bodies disperse about the stage, resist each other's embrace and, eventually, descend into solitary paroxysms. In Sims' case, this means a full-body twitching downstage centre that can only be stilled by a final ringing of one of those bells. Needless to say, I was grateful for the blackout that followed.
The exploration of sexual and social bonds that I have, albeit retrospectively, been reading into the first two pieces owes much to Gagnon's concluding sho me wut u gut, which wears (quite literally) its in-your-face attitude on its dancers' well-cut sleeves. Mind you, the men's shirts and the women's blouses--along with their pants, skirts, dress shoes, stiletto heels, and of course underwear--will all eventually come off by the end of the piece, with the five company members engaging in various same-sex and opposite-sex couplings, bodily gropings, animalistic howlings and, just because, dry humpings of the floor. Not that we don't also see moving moments of tenderness, not to mention some sublime group dancing. Indeed, at times during the piece I was reminded of what so captivated me about Gagnon and partner Dana Gingras' trademark choreography for The Holy Body Tattoo: high energy and highly physical unison movement performed by talented young dancers to pulsating music. It's hard to concentrate on that or any kind of movement technique when dancers' clothes start coming off (as Arlene Croce has famously written, in what might be taken as a ballerina's credo for never removing her tights, on stage it is the arabesque that is real, not the leg executing it). Which is not to say that nakedness in dance doesn't have its place (Alistair McCaulay has written perceptively on the topic--referencing Croce--in the New York Times), or that it cannot also be referenced in a smart and self-reflexive way (as in Frédérick Gravel's Usually Beauty Fails, which played the PuSh Festival this past year, and which I wrote about here). But the nudity as an end point in Gagnon's piece was so belaboured and so obvious that for me it actually got in the way of seeing the movement. Like Sims in Coutts' Fracture, it was a distraction.
P.
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